Google Adds Billing to App Engine

Google adds billing to the Google App Engine cloud computing platform so that developers can exceed the free usage quotas. Google says it will soon be reducing, but not eliminating, the free quotas. The new free quota levels will take effect on May 25, 2009.

Google announced Feb. 24 that the company has added billing to the
Google App Engine cloud computing platform so developers can exceed the free
usage quotas that have been in place. Google also said it will soon be
reducing, but not eliminating, the free quotas.
With the new billing capability, "developers can now purchase
additional computing resources on App Engine, enabling apps to scale beyond our
free quotas," Brett
Slatkin, a member of the Google App Engine team, wrote in a blog
post. "This has been our most requested improvement to App Engine and
we're thrilled to deliver it, as
promised."

When Google delivered App Engine in April 2008 it was free, albeit with
usage quotas. And although the quotas remain, developers will now be able to
pay to exceed those quotas. Slatkin said developers will have to "pay for
only what your app consumes beyond the free thresholds-prorated up to the
nearest penny."

App Engine remains free to get started, Slatkin said. "However,
along with many performance improvements over the past 10 months, we've learned
that we overestimated our initial free quota values," he
said. "Therefore, in 90 days we will be reducing
the free quota resources. We believe these new levels will continue to
support a reasonably efficient application serving around 5 million page views
per month, completely free."
The new free quota levels, which will take effect on May 25, 2009, are:

CPU Time: 6.5 hours of CPU time per
day
Bandwidth: 1 Gigabyte of data
transferred in and out of the application per day
Stored Data & Email Recipients:
these quotas will remain unchanged

The pricing for resources beyond those free quotas is:

$0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers
the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as
the CPU used for any Datastore usage.
$0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12
per GB bandwidth outgoing. This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic
between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.
$0.15 per GB of data stored by the
application per month.
$0.0001 per email recipient for emails
sent by the application

"Data in the datastore incurs additional overhead," and users
may "notice an increase in the amount of data stored by your
application that is listed in the Admin Console," Slatkin said.
"To decrease the impact of this change ... we've doubled
the free storage quota to 1GB," Slatkin said.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.